beer. 'I'm on drugs.'
'Ah.' Rogelio didn't seem displeased to have the beer to himself. 'Seen God yet?'
'Wrong kind of drugs,' Anna replied. 'But then I don't feel like hell anymore. I'll take that and be happy.'
'You're pretty beat up, Anna. We'll make love like porcupines for a while.'
At present she felt she'd never again want to be touched anywhere on her person with anything more forceful than a feather duster. Even through the painkillers, she knew she hurt. Knowing the feeling would pass, Anna smiled and said nothing.
'Tell me what happened,' Rogelio said.
Anna pushed her thoughts back to McKittrick Ridge. Her mind's eye was not seeing too clearly. 'Not much to tell,' she said after a moment. 'I got careless. Just stepped into space is what it felt like. With the pack I couldn't recover my balance and fell over. Then a rock busted loose and hit me.' She tried to remember the exact sequence of events and failed. 'Then Gertrude died and Hamlet died and Laertes died and everybody else lived happily ever after,' she finished.
Rogelio kissed her gently as if she were made of glass. 'Whatever they're giving you, save some for me.'
What sounded like the report of an automatic weapon rattled outside the window and Anna started. 'Firecrackers,' Rogelio explained soothingly. 'The kids are gearing up. Tomorrow is the Fourth of July.'
The third of July: Anna's mind turned on the date.
'What is it,
'Today Zach would have been forty.' Usually Anna forbore speaking of Zachary. Not just to Rogelio, but to anyone. The drugs had lowered her defenses.
For a while Rogelio said nothing. He finished the Ballena, stared out of the second-story window. Beyond, where the low hills north of Carlsbad met the sky, afternoon thunderheads were beginning to build.
'My birthday was a week ago yesterday,' he said finally. 'June twenty-fifth.'
'Happy birthday,' Anna said and: 'I didn't know.'
'You never bothered to ask,' he said evenly, his eyes still on the thunderclouds. 'I turned thirty-two.' Anna hadn't bothered to ask about that, either. 'To get your undivided attention, it seems a person has got to die. I'm not willing to go quite that far.' He rose, put the empty beer bottle in the front pouch pocket of the Mexican-made cotton pullover he wore. The hospital could not be trusted to recycle the glass.
'I'm glad you came.' Anna felt lost and guilty and tired. 'I'll try to pay more attention.'
'Don't knock yourself out.' He kissed her and left.
Anna promised herself she would take better care of him. She would make a plan. First, though, she must sleep. 'Happy birthday, Zach,' she whispered as the drugs took her back.
She dreamt of trying to call him, of standing in a phone-booth at the corner of Fifty-second and Ninth, but the street gangs had spray-painted over his number and the holes on the dial phone didn't match up with the digits.
Anna was awakened to eat a supper not worth being conscious for and again, later, to take a sleeping pill. By the next morning when a nurse, a woman in her fifties who managed by some miracle of personal grooming to make the white polyester nurse's uniform look chic, poked her head in to say: 'Want a visitor?' Anna did.
The drugged sleep had obliterated the memory of much of Rogelio's visit but Anna was left with a vague sense that she needed to make amends.
She was not to have the chance. It was Christina and Alison. Alison had a hand-drawn get well card with a camel on it. She'd wanted to draw Gideon to keep Anna company while she was sick, but she was better at camels so she drew a camel with 'Gideon' carefully lettered in a cartoon bubble coming out of its mouth.
'I fed Piedmont. Your door was unlocked,' Christina said.
'You lifted down the sack.
Christina winked at Anna. The gesture seemed rakish on her serene countenance.
'Credit where credit is due,' Anna said. 'Thank you both.'
'We stayed and petted him for one half of a hour,' Alison added. 'I kissed him on his head.' That seemed to finish the subject in the child's mind. The top of her head disappeared from Anna's sight below the foot of the bed and sounds of rummaging ensued. Something ordinary being converted into a toy, Anna guessed.
'Thank you,' she repeated, this time for Christina's ear alone.
Christina had brought a change of clothes, a comb and brush, hand mirror, colored hairbands, and some 'Safari' cologne. 'It seemed more fitting than 'White Shoulders,'' she explained.
Again, Anna started to cry. 'Damn,' she cursed herself and immediately regretted the fist she pounded into the coverlet in accompaniment. Pain shot up her shoulder and neck and into her skull. 'I'm turning into a weeping willow,' she complained.
'Heaven forbid!' Christina returned with easy laughter. 'We can't have Anna Pigeon The Great And Terrible in tears. What is the world coming to? Here,' she arranged Anna's pillows and, standing beside the bed, began to brush out her hair. 'Hold this.'
Anna held one pigtail in her hand while Christina French-braided the other side into a neat plait. 'Already I'm feeling healthier, more together. The next braid might perform miracles. Where did you learn to do that?'
'Well, you can either go to beauty school or have a four-year-old daughter who is a little V. A. I. N.'
'Vee, ay, eye, en: vain,' Alison chanted by rote from the floor, where she'd dragged Anna's hiking boots from the closet.
Anna laughed. It hurt.
'Well, well,' Christina said. 'We learn something every day. So. Learn me. What happened? I thought you were Ms. Backwoodswoman, able to leap tall trees at a single bound.'
'Fell off the trail,' Anna replied. 'Heavy gravity area.' She was rewarded for the feeble and plagiarized witticism by the warmth of Christina's smile. She enjoyed even its reflection in the hand mirror where she watched the other woman's porcelain fingers weave her hair. 'Will you come do my hair every morning till my collarbone heals?' Anna teased.
'Yes,' Christina said simply and Anna believed her. 'You don't whine half as much as Alison does when I pull too hard.'
'Comb too hard, Momma,' came a correction from the floor. 'You make groves in people's heads.'
'Grooves,' Christina said mildly. 'Gee, are, oh, oh, vee, ee, ess: grooves.'
'Grooves,' Alison repeated obediently and added: 'In people's heads. Look! Magic! Alley shazam!' She stood. Anna could just see her head over the foot of the bed. The little girl held her finger out, a rock balanced on the tip. Slowly, she turned it over. The rock didn't fall off. 'A sticky rock,' she explained, as if to free her mother and Anna from unbearable suspense. With her other hand she plucked the magic rock from her finger and stuck it on her tongue.
'Alison!' her mother cried. 'Stop that. For heaven's sake! You know better.' If she hadn't held three strands of half-plaited hair strung through her fingers, Anna didn't doubt that she would have vaulted the bed and made the little girl spit the rock into her hand.
Unperturbed, Alison lifted the bit of gravel carefully off her tongue and stuck it on the bed's footboard. 'Tastes like the paste in Dottie's toy box,' she said.
Christina wrapped Anna's braids into a graceful figure eight and pinned them in place. As she put away the comb and mirror, Anna dabbed on a little cologne. She hoped Rogelio would come back. But not just now. She looked in the other woman's guileless face. The dark eyes were opaque today. 'After the lion-taming episode, I was afraid you wouldn't ever speak to me again,' Anna said.
'I thought about it,' Christina admitted. 'Sometimes you are such a pain in the pasta fazzouli, Anna!'
'Why did you come today?'
'I don't know. To clear my good name?' Christina smiled as she folded herself gracefully into the uncompromising right angles of the red plastic visitors' chair. 'You're hurt. I like you. I'm here.'
'Thanks,' was all Anna could manage but it was, at least, sincere.
'I wouldn't take that kind of abuse from a lesser person, you know,' Christina said. 'I hope you're duly flattered.'
'I hope you never take any abuse from anybody, ever,' Anna said seriously. Christina looked a little startled at her vehemence, and Anna wondered if she'd hit a nerve.
